by Batya Gur
“No,” Matty Cohen said and shook his head strenuously as if to emphasize his own words. “I didn’t want anyone to know that I was…that…nobody knew that I would be turning up in the middle of filming. I set my cell phone on vibrate so no one would hear. It was in my pocket. I was standing right next to the door to the roof, I could see it was my wife phoning, and all I said was, ‘What?’ when I answered. She spoke and then I said, quietly, ‘I’m on my way.’ Nobody could have heard that, certainly not on the roof, it’s completely open up there and there’s no way, but not down below, either, nobody could…”
“So then you immediately started running back in the same direction?”
“I told you, I was afraid my kid—”
“No one knew you were there?” Eli Bachar asked again.
“No, it was a secret, you know, I wanted…I needed to catch them in the act, because there had already been a decision to stop filming.”
“How can that be?” Eli Bachar asked, surprised. “Israel Television decides to stop a production, and people keep working on it anyway? How is that technically possible?”
“First of all,” Matty Cohen said as he lowered his head and scrutinized his fingers, “such a decision is made without fanfare, we didn’t want to…nobody knew about it yet, only Benny Meyuhas himself and his producer, Hagar, and maybe I said something to Max Levin, I don’t remember exactly. We didn’t want a big ruckus on our hands, but I’m pretty sure Hagar told someone else. She’s so committed to Benny Meyuhas that…for many years she—”
“Now I get it,” Eli Bachar mumbled. He removed a crumpled piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and read in silence the names written there. “That’s why you’re not on this list.”
“What list?” Matty Cohen asked, dismayed.
“The list of who was in the building last night, when the accident occurred. You’re not listed because nobody knew…but Zadik knew, he’s the one who told me.”
“Zadik knew,” Matty Cohen agreed. “Of course he knew, he’s the one…I mean, I didn’t make the decision to stop filming on my own. But he didn’t know that it was last night that I was planning to show up. Nobody knew that.”
“What about the guard? The person in charge of security? He didn’t see you enter?”
Matty Cohen poured water into the foam cup, shook his head, and took a long sip. “No, he didn’t see me. He couldn’t have seen me, because I came in the back way, from the parking area in the back.”
Eli Cohen threw him a puzzled look. “What parking area in the back?”
“There’s a small parking lot behind the String Building. All the old-timers here know about it, there’s an entrance from there up a flight of stairs and straight into the building. The door is locked, but there are people with keys. Senior staff. That enables us to park behind the building and enter without anyone—”
“What does that mean, ‘senior staff’? Who does that include?”
“Well, department heads have a key, but lots of other people, too: carpentry shop workers, people in the Scenery Department, people involved in the big shows produced in the String Building. I suppose the people who produce Popolitika, you know, there’s this big studio downstairs for the Friday-evening programs, that sort of thing. So the people working on those shows, the regulars, they have keys. It’s hard to say anymore who does and who doesn’t.”
“What I would like to ask of you,” Eli Bachar said, stealing a glance at his watch, “is that after your meeting you’ll come down to police headquarters at the Russian Compound. I have an idea—”
“That’s impossible,” Matty Cohen said, visibly dissatisfied. “I’ve got to speak with Rubin after the meeting to see what’s going to be happening with this Iddo and Eynam, and then this afternoon…I can’t not be at the funeral, it’s bad enough I didn’t know…”
“You’ll be back in time for the funeral,” Eli Bachar promised. “I personally will bring you back in time.”
“But what…why do you need to—”
“First of all I need a signed statement from you,” Eli Bachar said. “And second, there’s…I had this idea about memory. You’ll see. Trust me.”
“But first I’ve got to get to this meeting,” Matty Cohen said reproachfully. “I’ve got a few matters that can’t be postponed.”
“I’ll be waiting for you here,” Eli Bachar promised, “either in this room or in Aviva’s office.”
“You want me to send Max Levin in?” Matty Cohen offered.
“That’s all right, I’ll call him,” Eli Bachar said, accompanying him to the door. From there he watched Matty Cohen enter Zadik’s office, saw Aviva talking on the phone. She swiveled her chair toward the window and lowered her voice.
When the door to Zadik’s office closed, Eli Bachar motioned to Max Levin to step into the little office.
“I’m a wreck,” Max Levin said as he sat in one of the two upholstered chairs near the wall. “There’s no blood left in my veins, only coffee. I’m simply a wreck, a total wreck.” He looked at Eli Bachar, fatigued. “I already told them everything last night. I don’t have anything more to add.” Eli Bachar took in the small, wrinkled face while Max Levin rubbed his red eyes. “Thirty years, right from the beginning I’m here. All those years you work close to someone, your lives are all tangled up with each other, and suddenly, in a single moment—”
“I just want to go over what you told us yesterday, and your signed statement,” Eli Bachar explained. He read aloud the details of the moment Max Levin had discovered Tirzah’s body under the marble pillar, how he had happened to be there because he had been looking for a blue horse for Benny Meyuhas’s production, how the guard wouldn’t let in Avi, the lighting technician who had been sent to fetch the sun gun, how he, Max Levin, had gotten him in. “Is that just the way it was?” he asked in the end, and Max Levin nodded and added, “Her whole face was crushed…blood…it was…” And he fell silent.
“So, you don’t have a key to the back entrance of the String Building?” Eli Bachar asked matter-of-factly.
“You’ll find this funny,” Max Levin said with a sigh. “I’m the person who came up with that back entrance, and I always use it because most of my work takes place at the String Building, that’s where my office is. But I had left the keys in the pocket of my jacket, and when I came at night I was wearing a windbreaker…because Benny Meyuhas called me—”
“Tell me, is it always like that?” Eli Bachar asked. “Do you always work so late into the night?”
“Benny Meyuhas called me, it was urgent. And because…” He stopped talking a moment, then muttered, “I’ve been working with Benny Meyuhas more than, well, nearly thirty years, so he gets special treatment from me. He can ask me for something in the middle of the night, and he only calls me if it’s really urgent,” Max Levin explained, stroking his wrinkled, grizzled cheeks and clicking his large, white teeth, which were too perfect to be real.
“What was so urgent here?” Eli Bachar asked. “There were so many of you here—actors, a lighting technician, Tirzah, you—why at night?”
“These were night scenes, I explained that yesterday,” Max Levin said. “From Iddo and Eynam, a project that Benny Meyuhas has been working on for years. The screenplay was written years ago, and filming started three months ago, and now…it’s almost finished.”
“But why at night?” Eli Bachar persisted. “It’s December, dark already around five p.m., why is it necessary to film in the middle of the night?”
“No, you don’t understand,” Max Levin said, propping up his head by putting his elbows on the dusty glass desktop. “They needed the moon. They were filming Gemullah, the heroine of the story. She walks on roofs at night, she suffers from moonsickness. That’s the way it is in the story by Agnon,” he explained. It seemed to Eli Bachar that he heard a note of pride in the last sentence, as though Max Levin knew that he, Eli Bachar, was not familiar with the story by Agnon, which was in fact true but which he had no
intention of revealing.
“I understand,” Eli Bachar said with assurance, “that Matty Cohen was there last night. What was he doing there?”
“I only heard this morning that he was there,” Max Levin said carefully, stealing a cautious look at Eli Bachar. “He’s the head of the Production Department, in charge of the money. Didn’t you ask him that? He was just sitting with you, wasn’t he? Last night he didn’t come to…but what’s that got to do with anything?”
“It’s just that I understood he was coming to put a stop to the production,” Eli Bachar explained. “So did he?”
“Nobody saw him there. If he was there, he left before—” Max Levin’s voice was full of scorn. “Nobody is going to shut this production down in the middle, even if it’s over budget. It’s not…it’s a project that too many people…have taken too seriously—”
“So how is it that if so many people are involved in it,” Eli Bachar asked, “and so much money, and people are putting in time in the middle of the night—how is such negligence possible?”
Max Levin explained at length the way Tirzah worked and ran her operations, how she never permitted a soul to touch the things she made, even he, Max Levin, who had worked with her for thirty years: “And believe me, she knew I am a very responsible person, she knew very well, but still she did not allow me.” He clasped his knotty fingers and gazed intently at the blackened edges of his large fingernails. “Nobody was allowed to touch her stuff,” Max Levin said, “nobody was responsible for it but her, and that’s just…I don’t want to use the word ‘fault,’ but it’s only her fault. She would have told you that herself.” He continued to talk, about Tirzah’s perfectionism, about the way she insisted on getting every detail right, about long hours they had worked together, he as the head of Props and she as head of Scenery, and about how—in spite of her pedantry—everyone loved her, how they went out of their way to help her. “Everyone: the workers, the seamstresses, everyone.” Especially on this project, Iddo and Eynam, not so much out of respect for Benny Meyuhas—“Not that he isn’t respected, he’s very respected, he’s still an important director even if they haven’t been letting him take on projects he wants for years. But he’s a person who keeps his distance, who doesn’t really relate to people personally”—but rather for her, since Benny was her husband. “Well, as if her husband,” he corrected himself. “They lived like husband and wife for seven or eight years, ever since she split up with Rubin. But Rubin is Benny Meyuhas’s friend, too, until this very day, even though his wife…” He wiped his eyes and paused for a long moment.
“Never mind all these details,” he summed up, “it’s a terrible tragedy. But nobody but Tirzah is to blame. That is to say, not exactly to blame, but she’s responsible…I mean…” He stopped speaking and cast a look of sheer misery at Eli Bachar. “Any way you try to say it, it sounds awful,” he said. “But that’s the truth. I’ll tell you that, and anyone else will, too. Avi the lighting technician, everyone.”
“You know,” Eli Bachar said after a moment, in a wistful tone he was adopting in order to provoke Max Levin, “the folks from forensics measured the angle of the pillar and calculated the way it falls and all that, and they believe it couldn’t have fallen by itself, such a marble pillar could not have just fallen on her skull and crushed it. She would have moved aside.”
Max Levin pressed his hands to his face and rubbed again like someone who had just awakened. From behind the hands covering his face he said, “Believe me, I myself don’t understand it. Maybe she was tired…when you’re tired you move more slowly, you don’t pay attention, maybe—”
“You don’t think it’s possible that someone pushed the pillar on top of her?”
Max Levin lowered his hands, straightened in his chair—even so he looked short, an impression reinforced by his thin body—and looked at Eli Bachar in astonishment. “Impossible. No way someone would…What? Accidentally?”
Eli Bachar remained silent.
“No, no. That’s impossible,” Max Levin said, renouncing the very idea. “Not even worth discussing.” He stared at Eli Bachar and made him feel a certain discomfort in spite of his years of experience. He had asked this question in a mechanical manner, almost without intending to, and had not expected so vigorous a response, that Max Levin would be so personally offended. He wondered about his accent—it did not seem exactly Russian, he could not place it—which thickened when he raised his voice and repeated, “Impossible! No way, you should not even be talking that way. Who would ever want—what is this here, Hollywood? No way that Tirzah—do you know how much people loved her here? Thirty years she’s been here, and she doesn’t have a single enemy. Believe me, she wasn’t an easy person to work with, she drove us all crazy, but you know what? She was fair, so very fair, you just don’t find people like that anymore. And how much, how much she cared about people, and helped them. Ask the seamstresses, and even the painters, the carpenters—no question. Ask Avi the lighting technician, he’ll tell you the same thing.”
Eli Bachar nodded and rose from his seat. “Yes, Avi’s waiting outside, I’ll talk to him in a minute. But…where is he now, Benny Meyuhas?”
Max Levin shrugged. “I imagine at home, he’s probably…I would bet he’s not alone, Hagar must be with him. That’s his assistant, his producer, they’ve been together for years. And friends must be with him at home, but ask Aviva, she’ll find out for you. He stood up in a rush and moved to the door, opened it, and called, “Aviva, can you help the policeman here find Benny?”
“Of course,” Aviva said. “Come here, Eli. Your name’s Eli, right? Let’s try and find him at home. Arye Rubin told me before that he’s at home. Come, sit here.” She removed several files from the seat next to her desk and patted it for him to sit there. Eli Bachar looked at her and sat down obediently.
CHAPTER FOUR
You see this guy?” Intelligence Officer Danny Balilty asked Matty Cohen as he placed his hand on the shoulder of the tall, thin man who had risen from his seat when he entered the room. The man had come around the desk, stopped in front of Matty Cohen, and shaken Balilty’s proffered hand with cool politeness while Balilty hoisted the belt on his trousers over his bulging belly with his other hand. Next to one another the pair looked like Laurel and Hardy. “Take a good look at him,” Balilty continued with obvious pride, as though discussing a close relation he had raised himself. “You’re looking at a real artist, and don’t forget it. Ilan here is a painter, not just some technician. He’s doing us a big favor here, isn’t that so, Ilan?”
After nearly an hour sitting across from Ilan Katz, Matty Cohen was wringing his hands and rocking from side to side in the chair, which was too small for his huge frame. He had to give an answer—any answer—not only to satisfy this Ilan Katz, who had sympathetically entreated him to tell him anything that came to mind about the moment he had spotted Tirzah with another person as he made his way above them across the catwalk, but also because he was so very tired and his feet hurt and his left shoulder was bothering him and maybe his arm, too; all he really wanted was for them to leave him alone so he could go home and sleep.
“I’m not really even certain it was Tirzah,” Matty had declared with hesitation at the outset of their conversation. “There was very little light, that area is always dark,” he had said in a pleading voice, but this Ilan Katz, who sat beside him, was staring at him through narrowed lids as though he had heard nothing Matty Cohen had been saying and had no intention of letting him off the hook. His eyes, inside their web of tiny wrinkles, radiated patience and trust and expectation; he merely sat there and without averting his gaze said, for the thousandth time, “Anything. It doesn’t matter what, any little thing you can recall, a spot on the wall, a crack in the tiles, anything.”
And because of his persistence, just to get him off his back, Matty Cohen added, “I think he was taller.” He took a sip of water. “The person whose back was to me, he was taller than she was.”
&
nbsp; “Aha!” Ilan Katz exulted. “You see? I knew you’d remember!” He tossed aside the vague drawing he had made, quickly scribbling instead on a new blank white sheet of paper two figures, the profiles of a woman and a slightly taller man. “You see? Every single word teaches us something,” he summed up with satisfaction, squinting at his work. “You said ‘he,’ so it’s clear it was a man you saw, and you said ‘back,’ which means he was facing the woman and maybe he attacked her, even if you yourself don’t know it. Let’s give him a few more characteristics according to what you remember. We always remember more than what we think we do,” he added in a paternal tone.
The events of that morning after a sleepless night, his son’s ceaseless cough and red face burning with fever, Malka’s hysteria—what kind of mother was she, always at wit’s end?—the news about Tirzah, all these people that would not stop questioning him and pleading with him and demanding things from him and putting pressure on him, the talking, the threats—all these had unnerved him. Even Hagar, who had caught him on his cell phone on the way back from the hospital and warned him not to try and put a stop to Benny’s production, had left a bad taste in his mouth. True, he had told her he was not a person to be threatened, had added that there was no reversing the decision; but still the conversation with her had been highly distressing and weighed heavily on him. “You are completely heartless,” she had told him. Why heartless? Are responsibility and heartlessness one and the same? Let someone try and tell him that being responsible meant being mean. All in all he merely had a sense of responsibility. What was she talking about, what had he wanted? After all, this wasn’t exactly his father’s money; he was just doing his job properly. But he hated to be the guy who cut off the money supply, the guy everyone loves to hate. People at work thought he was the bad guy simply because he was the one who doled out the money. No one knew he was really a good person, someone who hated strife and contention. He should have left this job ages ago; he belonged elsewhere, in a different job. He should have been an accountant or at least a tax consultant. He had started studying accounting, and if it had not been for Tamar, he would have finished his studies by now and would have had his own firm, the works. But she had run off with their daughter after two years of marriage and for the past eight years had been bleeding him dry. He had been willing to let her go—“Just leave the kid here and get out”—but she would have none of it, had gone instead to a lawyer who had milked him for everything he was worth. He had given her half the apartment, half their savings, alimony, and in addition to everything she had turned the child against him. And now this morning, first Tirzah Rubin, then that officer from Investigations, Eli Bachar, then the trip to police headquarters; he had never set foot in there before, except for one time when he had come to give testimony on behalf of a neighbor who had been attacked. What reason would he have for being at police headquarters? He had never broken the law. And here he was like some criminal, entering from the back gate, from the parking lot. From there Eli Bachar had led him through the building where everyone could see him—in fact he thought he had caught a glimpse of Epstein from Maintenance—through a long hallway, motioning him to follow him up to the third floor. Eli Bachar had run ahead; Matty Cohen was breathless trying to keep up, he was nearly choking by the time he reached the end of the hallway, and just at the end, when it seemed that there was no more hallway left to pass through, Eli Bachar had opened a white door and suddenly another hallway appeared, a completely new wing, the smell of fresh paint and wood pungent, the rooms empty. In the last room sat this intelligence officer, Balilty, with bags under his beady eyes. Both men had sat facing him, and once again he had had to drink coffee even though he was forbidden to do so; he felt the blood humming behind his ears, the throbbing in his head. How the men had pestered him! Was Tirzah well liked, did she have enemies, what was her relationship with Benny Meyuhas like, did one of the Scenery Department workers hold a grudge against her, was Arye Rubin a real Don Juan, could there be women who…they even mentioned Niva and the boy. As for him, he had always hated gossip and slander. How many times had he told them that Tirzah was a fine person, pedantic but fair, and that she had had no enemies, and that anyway, it had been an accident. After that they were all over him, asking him over and over again why he had gone there at night. And he had tried to explain about their work procedures, why it had been necessary for him to go there in the middle of the night to put a stop to the filming. “You don’t understand,” he had said. “We have a certain budget for original drama, and he used it all up. Now he’s filming additional scenes, patching up scenes, and these additions alone are costing fifty thousand dollars.”
